AIRE offers students the chance to apply for a challenge project

Gert Jervan, Dean of TalTech’s IT Faculty, invited students to apply for the AIRE Challenge Project at the AIRE Club on 5 June. While previously participation in projects was an external activity to the learning process, from next semester onwards it will be part of the learning process, lasting the whole semester, as in the case of one of the projects, Jervan confirmed the change.

The AIRE Club #26 on 5 June was a particular highlight for TalTech students, who gathered in the lobby of the main building after the end of the Innovation Festival to listen to the speakers. This time, the focus of the presentations was on project-based learning and how to better link thesis topics to business challenges. Gert Jervan, Dean of TalTech’s IT Faculty, said that students can apply for the AIRE challenge project as early as 21 June. According to him, taking part in such a project will give a good insight into the problems companies face on a day-to-day basis in production. At the same time, it gives people involved in the university a chance to give something back to society in a real way.

According to Jervan, a student involved in a project will benefit not only from technical skills but also from teamwork. “It’s important that young people can work in a group and think outside the box and be problem-solving oriented, so broadly speaking, social skills play an important role,” said Jervan. He said that while in the past participation in projects was external to the learning process, from next semester onwards it will be part of the learning process, as in the case of one of the projects, for the whole semester.

Practical output

At the club evening, the development manager of Valdek AS, Viljar Valdek, gave an explanatory comment on the AIRE project.According to him, TalTech postgraduates have also been members of the project team in their company in previous years, where they have further developed the machine learning and AI project to solve internal logistics problems. “I would like to acknowledge Juhan-Peep Ernitsa, who picked up the idea of the project that had been stagnating in the meantime and got the project off the ground through AIRE. We saw a lot of potential in it, but as there were no previous solutions of this kind in the world, we couldn’t even predict how the project would go. We are smarter now, but when we started the first part of the project in 2022, we could only detect people and pallets, we were still in our infancy,” Valdek recalls. Adding that the big picture is the name of the project: automated cargo tracking with machine vision. “It might sound too clichéd but it’s a very big project where the AIRE project was about phase two, in other words how to identify and find the best ways to identify the problems and the different inputs and what we need to know about the nature and capability of the system,” he said.

It is too early to talk about a financial victory, Valdek said, as the AIRE project was about creating a test environment rather than a concrete application. “First and foremost, it was a research project and only now can we start testing real situations to get real data, rather than acting on a hypothesis,” Valdek revealed.

Marek Lahk, a Master’s student who participated in the project, said he was very happy with the project and that its great value was that it solved a real problem, rather than a hypothetical one that had no immediate application. “The challenge can be seen as generating synthetic data. We had hoped that this part of the project would take a maximum of a month, but it ended up taking us three months. The most difficult part was probably the timing. I wanted to complete the project within the time frame of my thesis,” said Lahk.

More info:

1. Marek Lahki’s thesis is titled “Training a segment series for warehousing using synthetic data and fine-tuning for a digital twin”. The thesis can be found here: https://digikogu.taltech.ee/et/Item/4113691b-eb47-4bc5-87b8-8e2c399a66ed
2. You can apply here: https://aire-edih.eu/projektope/#kandideeri  

Photo by Viljar Valdek, Development Manager at Valdek AS, who participated in the AIRE demo project, private collection.